One of the most interesting things that every expert at what they do should realize is that there are many things that they are NOT an expert in. In fact, they could be complete and utter garbage at it.

Of course, I hate the term “expert” in almost every case because I know experts in my field, and I am nowhere near their level. I am willing to admit that I am certainly quite a bit above average when working with Transact-SQL in SQL Server. There are things I need to learn better, but I am willing to admit that I am no slouch.

Content: Yes, Website Programmer not so much

But it hit me as I was posting a blog on my drsql.link website, just how much of a beginner I am at building and maintaining a website. After an upgrade happened a week ago (and coincidentally, maybe, I had also just installed a Google plugin), a formatting tool for code that I was using was uninstalled. I honestly had no idea what gave me this power, but it was something I read about and tried.

Then all my code changed from this pretty-looking code block to a bit of unformatted text surrounded by [code] and [/code], along with some formatting. According to one of the various search engine/AI tools I tried, that method was old and was (I suppose) finally removed. I finally decided to give the markdown “` method a try, and that was a pretty nice change (if a bit manual). As I was cleaning up old posts (most of Saturday) I had this feeling like every other programmer I know probably would have been able to write some code to clean up the posts without having to touch like 40 blogs with SQL code in them. Probably in PowerShell, since that is the tool that is always mentioned as fixing everything.

Thing is, I don’t know. It all reminded me of how hard it is to start something you don’t know how to do. I keep getting better and better at using markdown, but even the way I do it is very manual. (I do most of my SQL writing in management studio, so I can run (and rerun and rerun the code.)

Frankly, back in June when I started this blog, all I knew was importing Word documents because that is what my Simple Talk experience had taught me over the past 10 years or so. Replicating that experience was well over my budget (and it wasn’t always that great either because of WordPress quirks), so I am making do with the basics because it isn’t something I know, and it is not something I would be willing to spend money learning. I fiddle a good bit,

Is there a point?

Just because you are great at one thing doesn’t mean you will be able to do other things immediately well. Perhaps not ever well. But it doesn’t mean you should try.

It does mean you shouldn’t be a jerk to people who aren’t great at what you do…even when they erroneously think they are. Frankly, they may have knowledge that will help you someday.